“What a ridiculous waste of time”?

Meetings have such a terrible reputation exactly because of these moments.

The worst thing about not taking meetings seriously is that everyone starts associating them with being a waste of time.

People don’t think they’re worth anything, so they don’t bother preparing. They turn up to meetings already checked out, treating them as if they’re taking a break from work. Participation is negligible, if not completely non-existent.

The person running the meeting, often the manager, gets frustrated and annoyed. It’s all a downward spiral and the worst meeting culture you can have.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Characteristics of a good meeting

Every meeting is an opportunity.

People gravitate towards success and effective meetings are a much better way to achieve that. On the banal, basic level: time saved is money saved.

Remember that a one-hour meeting with five people in it isn’t just a one-hour meeting at all. It’s really a five-hour meeting. That meeting has to be worth five hours of productivity for it to be effective.

Having multiple bad meetings in a row can be both demotivating and mentally draining. The people involved get stuck with a feeling of no progress, no sense of accomplishment, and no enjoyment in their work.

A great meeting is about as far away from that as you can get. Good meetings are hubs of creativity, motivation, and affirmation. They’re essential for clear communication, making sure that everyone is on the same page and understands what the next steps are. They can help you get unstuck and push forward with a project or a task if bouncing ideas off other people or getting clear direction is what you needed.

Meetings are one of the best opportunities to not just exchange information but to engage with your colleagues and interact with them. Those are the kind of meetings that are worth having and working towards.

Here is how you can achieve that.

7 strategies to adopt for good meetings

1) Never schedule a meeting without a clear outcome in mind.

The purpose of a meeting should be crystal clear to you, as the person scheduling it, and to every participant. Why are you all here? What are you trying to achieve?

You have to figure this out and communicate it clearly.

There’s a huge difference between trying to make a decision, keeping everyone updated, or having a coherent discussion. They call for different kinds of meetings and different styles of moderation. Having a clear outcome in mind is even more important than having an agenda because the outcome is what dictates the agenda.

Possible desired outcomes are things like:

• Agreement on the next steps of a project
• Exchanging information so that everyone knows what everyone else is up to
• Involving people in a decision that has multiple stakeholders
• A space for social interaction and team-building

If you get invited to a meeting and you aren’t clear on what the desired outcome is, ask! It’s better to say “I’m not actually sure what the purpose of this meeting is” than to sit there and think it.

2) Avoid starting a meeting without an agenda.

This is an old-school favourite.

Agendas are one of the easiest ways to give a meeting structure.

Agendas can rarely be judged as “good” or “bad”. A bullet point list of topics is enough to work with, in the vast majority of cases. Having a standing document where you just jot down topics whenever they come to mind is a good start. That’s a simple solution for recurring meetings.

Sometimes, you should put some effort into crafting an agenda e.g. for long meetings.

• Do you need an icebreaker at the start, so that people relax and can get into a topic?
• Should you set the scene or present background information to make sure everyone’s on the same page?
• If you’ll be covering multiple topics, what’s the best way to structure them, so that conversation flows naturally from one topic to the next?

Not every meeting has to have an agenda.

Having an agenda for any kind of social meeting is a good way to ruin the meeting.

3) Only invite people who have to be there.

Sometimes people prefer to invite everyone, even if they’re only peripherally involved, on the off-chance that one of them would feel left out or miss important information.

In those situations, it’s better to document and consciously update people than to have them involved in the discussion, if they don’t need to be.

A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself if it’s possible to achieve the outcome that you’ve set out without this person’s presence. If yes, would it be the optimal outcome?

What you want to achieve is a meeting where everyone is engaged and everyone is participating.

Having people sit there who aren’t paying attention because they don’t feel like their input is necessary brings down the whole atmosphere and is a waste of their time.

The only way to avoid that is to structure the meeting in such a way that it brings value to every person in the invite.

4) Give all participants guidance on what to prepare.

Most people show up to meetings with full faith they can wing it and, honestly, that can work. Sometimes.

But does it often limit how effective a meeting can be? Definitely.

If you’re meeting to come to a decision:

• It’s much better to prepare pros and cons before,
• Ask everyone to think of any additional ones,
• And to sort out their own thoughts and figure out how to articulate them before they even walk into the room.
• You’ll spend a lot less time in the meeting with long pauses because people need time to process and think about something.
• People will have the time they need to come up with good feedback.

If what you’re looking for is a laid-back exchange, someone to bounce ideas off, then you can forego the preparation.

The ideal and perfect meeting culture would be one where it’s expected that you prepare for every meeting and those situations are the exceptions that prove the rule.

5) Make the meeting interactive.

Assume that everyone who’s in the meeting cares about the topic and wants to participate. You want to give them opportunities to do that.

If you’re finding it difficult to get engagement, think about how you can change the style of the meeting to facilitate it.

Putting in just a little more effort to prepare something closer to a workshop, like bringing in models or sketching out a mindmap, can completely change the atmosphere.

It’s also likely to give people the impression that they learned something new. That’s one of the best feelings to walk out of a meeting with.

6) Moderate! Be strict.

The idea of a moderator is to have someone present in the meeting whose primary responsibility is to lead the meeting.

Good moderation is extremely complex. It takes a long time to learn but everyone has to start somewhere.

Moderating involves:

• Directing the discussion so that the desired outcome is achieved.
• Cutting off anything that will derail the meeting. This includes off-topic discussions, as well as getting stuck on very small details that aren’t important.
• To step in if things get too heated for a rational conversation.
• Prompting participants whose opinions are valuable.
• Interceding if there’s an awkward pause or if everyone “gets stuck.”
• Reading the language of the room. Is everyone bored or still listening? Does someone obviously disagree with something but isn’t speaking up? Are people starting to look out the window or at the clock? This is how you assess if the meeting is on track or if you need to shake things up.
• Making sure that the meeting ends on time.

Moderating can be difficult. Achieving the right balance between letting the discussion flow naturally and knowing when to step in doesn’t come naturally. Cutting people off too often is frustrating for the people in the meeting. Letting a discussion go on too long can derail the meeting and make it difficult for people to come back to a topic.

A moderator has to toe the line between those two.

You need to become comfortable with interrupting people and asking them to stay on topic or to leave a topic for a later time. This feels terrible the first few times but it’s better to be strict.

This is also why having a moderator who is mainly interested in participating can be quite risky. It’s very easy to forget to do all those things because you get caught up in the discussion. The moment your focus is on what your opinions are and what you want to say is the moment you’ve stopped moderating.

Keep in mind that it’s better to end a meeting early or to stop for a break in the middle than to ignore the body language of everyone participating.

It’s also better to jump in and address moments of conflict than to let everyone notice certain behaviours and not comment. If, for example, someone rolls their eyes at what a presenter says, it’s better to ask them to speak up than to let it go. All of this is something that can be brought in through having a moderator.

7) Only schedule a meeting if it absolutely has to be a meeting.

Meetings are often the easiest and quickest solution that comes to mind when you want to talk to someone.

Scheduling a meeting for every discussion is often the first resort.

This lends itself to an environment filled with distractions, where meetings take over the entire workday. That isn’t an environment that’s conducive to real productivity.

A better way to think about meetings is that they’re great when they’re necessary.

And only when they’re necessary.

If a discussion can be resolved in written form, then it’s better to send an email, a Slack message, leave a comment on a Google document, or whatever method is most commonly used in your company.

Lots of discussions are too complex to have through writing, need to be resolved more quickly, or involve too many people for a different channel to be ideal.

Those are the situations in which you can and should schedule a meeting.

Good meetings enhance leadership

Meetings are likely a big part of your everyday responsibilities as a manager, in a remote environment.

Investing time in getting great at them will change how your team views your leadership and how much value you can get out of working with your team.

The volume of applications often reaches in the hundreds, sometimes in the thousands. Having such a high volume means great candidates can fall through the cracks very easily and it also means that job seekers feel like their chances of landing a job are slim.

But, believe it or not, hiring managers are rooting for you. They want to have great applicants. Recruiters spend a lot of time searching for how to source the best talent.

Hiring managers invest an unbelievable amount of time looking for the right fit. What you need to do is show them that you are the right fit.

Here are some of the ways you can set yourself up for success when you’re applying for jobs, written from the hiring manager perspective.

When is the best time to submit a job application?

The best time is whenever you’re ready to deliver the best application you can.

There’s a lot of conventional advice like avoiding weekends or trying to apply at the beginning of the week, so you get a response as quickly as possible. This is mostly irrelevant to your chances of success.

A successful application will always be a high-quality one that stood out from other applicants for some reason. If you need an extra day to deliver that, it’s worth taking the time for it.

How many jobs to apply for per day

Again, this depends on the quality of application you can deliver.

The typical recommendation of applying for 5-10 jobs isn’t ideal. That makes it impossible to properly tailor your application to each company or even to take the time to research the company enough that you know you’d be excited to work there.

That isn’t something you can mask. Apply for one job a week, if that will be a great application.

How to apply for jobs

1. Apply for the right job

What is the right job?

It’s a job that you actually want to do.

You’d be surprised at the number of people who apply for jobs they’re clearly not suited for or that they’re simply not motivated to do in the first place.

The point of this isn’t to say that you need to fulfill the requirements of the position’s description 100% to apply. It’s rather to say: Ask yourself honestly if you would be excited waking up every morning to do this job.

You can’t sell your motivation if you aren’t motivated.

It’s very obvious when someone is applying for a role because they think it’ll be easy, because it’s remote, or because they’re desperate and are applying for anything. None of this will help you get that job.

Rather than sending out 100 lackluster applications, send ten great ones for jobs that genuinely excite you and that you can do well.

2. Research the company and their product

Research here doesn’t mean look briefly through their website. It means:

• If they offer a free trial or a freemium model, create an account and use the product.
• Spend some hours of your time understanding how the product works, who the target audience is.
• Look through their help articles or blog posts.
• Check out their social media.
• Read up on any interviews done by the company’s founders.

This takes a lot of time and effort but it’s worth it.

Nothing shows your motivation the way this will. It’s also an important step for yourself, to develop that genuine motivation in the first place.

How else would you do that if you knew nothing about the company and the people and perspectives present at it?

Your application should make it clear that you know the company you’re applying to. You’re applying for that specific company, to work on their product, and you can say why.

This is really hard if you’re sending out applications based exclusively on the position description.

3. Tailor your cover letter and CV

The extent to which you do this depends a lot on the expectations and requirements of the company you’re applying to but the many companies still ask for a cover letter at the very least, even if they don’t judge based on CVs as much.

What’s important to keep in mind is that both have to sell your abilities.

The cover letter is your main opportunity to convince the hiring manager on the other end that you have the skills required to do the job well and that you have the right mentality and culture fit for the company.

A good cover letter should touch on the main requirements mentioned in the job description and fundamentally answer the following questions: why you, why this job, and why this company.

Your motivation should come through loud and clear:

• Why you’re applying for this job
• Why you believe you’re the best candidate – the experience and skills that you bring to the table that no one else can
• What’s special about this company that makes you excited to work there

CVs might not be looked at in a ton of detail but it’s still important to highlight your relevant experience there, rather than share a lot of information that has nothing to do with the job you’re applying for.

4. Go the extra mile

Whatever you can do to make your application stand out will be a meaningful use of your time.

Not only will it help you in your job search but it will also help you develop broader skills and deeper self-confidence.

Start by putting real effort into the application process.

• Answer the questions that they ask for properly and with attention to detail.
• If they do some kind of challenge or project as part of the hiring process, make sure you read it, ideally multiple times.
• Use every opportunity to display an attention to detail and true commitment to that company. This is hard and it takes time but trust me, as a hiring manager, that effort will be noticed and eventually rewarded.

Anything else you can provide on top of that is great.

• Can you create a website that introduces you in more depth?
• Do you run a blog that shows what you can do?
• Can you show that you’ve engaged with the company’s product properly?
• Do you have any other professional or personal profiles that show more of who you are and what you’re interested in?

Whatever it is you do, try to tailor it to the company you’re applying to.

For example, if a company writes repeatedly about their focus on a text-based hiring process, don’t record a video for them. But if a company talks a lot about the value they place on face-to-face interactions as part of their hiring process, consider recording a video. Think about what you can do to show this particular company that you’re a good fit for them.

It could be that you do all of this and still don’t get the job that you wanted.

Don’t get discouraged.

Sometimes hiring managers are looking for specific profiles or types of people at certain times. That’s an unavoidable part of hiring and of job seeking.

You’ll still have written great applications for the places you applied to and that experience will always help you for the next applications you write.

If you’re going to write an application, make it a great one.

Change means instability. Instability leads to insecurity. Insecurity creates fear.

There’s a limit to how effective your support can be, simply because a certain amount of that reaction is personality-driven.

You might not have a formal change manager but treating it as if you are can make a huge difference.

What does a change manager do?

A change manager is responsible for planning, implementing, and managing organizational change initiatives. They work to ensure that changes are successful by minimizing resistance and maximizing adoption. Change managers typically have a strong understanding of human behavior and organizational dynamics.

Here are some of the specific duties of a change manager:

• Develop and implement change management plans: Change managers create plans that outline the steps that need to be taken to implement a change successfully. These plans typically include a timeline, communication strategy, and training plan.
• Assess the impact of change: Change managers assess the potential impact of change on individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole. This helps them to identify potential risks and develop mitigation strategies.
• Identify and manage resistance to change: Change managers work to identify and manage resistance to change. They use a variety of strategies to do this, such as communication, training, and coaching.
• Monitor and evaluate change initiatives: Change managers monitor the progress of change initiatives and evaluate their effectiveness. This helps them to identify areas where improvements can be made.

How to measure effective change management

It’s easier to invest the time if you know what you’re aiming for and why.

Depending on the change, it can impact:

• Employee engagement measured through surveys, focus groups, and interviews. It checks employee morale, willingness to adopt change, and overall engagement in the change process.
• Communication effectiveness: This can be measured through employee feedback, communication metrics, and surveys.
• Adoption rate, by tracking the number of employees who adopt the change, the speed at which adoption occurs, and the level of adoption across different groups.
• Business outcome metrics like financial metrics, customer satisfaction metrics, and operational metrics. The key question here is: Is the change achieving the desired business outcomes, such as increased productivity, improved customer satisfaction, or cost savings?

4 stages of change management

Preparation

The first stage is the preparation.

For example, let’s say you run a Support team and you need a more flexible hiring model, due to the specific circumstances that your company is facing. Because of this situation, you start researching different outsourcing companies.

In an ideal scenario, before you even get to the point where you start researching, you should have already discussed with your team the kinds of challenges you’re facing currently and that you’re thinking of a way to handle them. This means that by the time you actually get to outsourcing some of your support, the shock response is much lower.

As another example, say you’ve been struggling to manage performance in your team, either you’re finding it difficult to understand how everyone is performing in comparison to others or you’re finding it hard to identify what low performance looks like.

To solve this problem, you start thinking about the KPIs that you have available and defining some general standards across your team.

You should also start talking about this openly with your team well before any decision is made. Wherever and however you can include your team in the process that leads up to the change, you should do so. If you can’t include them, for whatever reason, be prepared for the pushback. That’s when the communication stage will hopefully come in handy.

Here’s a quick checklist to get your preparation done right:

• Research the different options you have available for dealing with your challenge
• Consider what the short-, mid-, and long-term consequences of this change will be
• Get as much buy-in from the people most impacted by the change as possible
• If you’re able to communicate it openly to start, try to at least get buy-in from your experienced and senior staff
• Make yourself articulate, as concisely as possible, why it is you’re implementing this change
• Understand how this change will impact the different layers of employees you have across your company
• Talk to others (in the industry or in your company) who have implemented similar changes and learn from their experience

Communication

Communication is one of the most complicated things to get right.

If you approach it systematically, it will likely go better. Here are some tips that might help:

• Create a communication plan for yourself but don’t overthink it. You want to make sure that you’re articulate and you know what you want to say but it cannot sound rehearsed.
• Once again, be absolutely clear on the reasons you’re implementing it. I cannot emphasise enough how essential it is to cover the “why” behind every decision, especially one that has an impact.
• Be as honest and open as you can be about the background and everything that went into the decision in the first place.
• Talk about the goals that you’re trying to achieve with this. Envision the best case scenario and conceptualise it for your team, so they can see it too. It’s easier for people to jump on board if they understand what you’re working towards.
• Ensure that everyone is informed directly, from the source, as quickly as possible.
• Be vulnerable. Maybe you’re also worried about how it’ll turn out or you can’t exactly predict the consequences. It’s better for you to say that than to pretend that you have all the answers.
• Try to talk to people individually, rather than to the group. It’s much easier to listen to someone properly when you’re talking one-on-one, and it’ll be easier for them to hear what you have to say too. One-on-one conversations are by their nature more humanising and bring people closer together.
• Make sure you plan in time to give people room and space to process it.

There are some messages that should come through as clearly as you can possibly make it in your communication. For example:

• You’re happy to discuss it in-depth with people whenever they need.
• You understand they might have questions and concerns.
• You will support them in whatever way you can.

It’s easy to underestimate how much of a difference the feeling that someone’s got your back can make when it comes to adjusting to something new.

There is such a thing as too much communication.

One of the hardest aspects of change management is knowing when to cut your losses. If you’ve invested hours of your time discussing the change with someone in your team and they still aren’t convinced or on board with it, you have to at some point accept that that can’t be helped.

If they’re not only unconvinced by it but they actively raise the discussion repeatedly with you or other teammates, you need to disengage from it and shield your team from it as much as possible.

It’s important to recognise that you have limited time, energy, and resources. One of your key responsibilities is to invest that in the right place and trying to have the same discussion repeatedly is not a good use of your time.

The more you humour it, the more it’ll hold your team back from adapting to the change and moving on.

Communicate. Communicate a lot. Expect that it will be necessary for a long time but pay attention to whether it gets too much.

Implementation

It’s time to actually roll out the change.

Assume a longer timeline

The first one is to assume that it’ll take weeks, if not months, for people to adapt to it. How long exactly will depend on the person, the type of change, the kind of environment you have and many other factors.

Once people have started adjusting to it, they might have new suggestions and feedback that didn’t occur to them before. Maybe some of those suggestions will be things that you didn’t think of previously either. Have an open ear for all of these things.

It could be that everything is technically rolled out but it takes a long time for you to truly understand the consequences of the decision.

For example, it’s possible that rolling out KPI goals across your team will have an impact on the culture and working environment in your team. This isn’t something that you can see or understand in the short-term.

It’s important to give yourself time to really get how people react to it, why they react in certain ways, and what the best way to move forward is for you. It’s much better to build this time into your plan, rather than scrambling to get everything done as quickly as you can.

Demystify the change

The second one is to try to demystify the change as quickly as possible.

If you’re rolling out a process that everyone in your team will have to suddenly start using for large proportions of their working day, show them what it will look like, talk to them about the purpose behind it, and how you’ll use the data from it.

If you’re changing the management structure within the team, give them access to their new managers as quickly as possible, make sure they have opportunities to interact with this person and get to know them and so on.

Establish success criteria

The third one is to establish success criteria early on in the process of implementation.

The more specific you are with your success criteria, the easier it will be for you to evaluate how your implementation went by the end. If at all possible, it’s great to make your success criteria measurable. Even if the main goal you want to achieve isn’t measurable in the first instance, think of ways that you could make it so.

Say you’re rolling out a career path structure across your team so that every individual has the opportunity to advance their careers.

• Perhaps this is something you started looking into because you felt that your retention rate wasn’t as good as it could be and some of the reasons behind that were down to career development opportunities.
• It’s pretty easy to measure whether introducing career paths had an impact (by taking, for example, the 2-year retention rate from before and measuring it against the 2-year retention rate afterwards).
• Maybe your retention rate is actually fine but what you want to increase is employee engagement. In this case, the best way to make the impact measurable would be to run an employee engagement survey before that asks everyone to rate different aspects of their experience.
• Then you could run the same survey afterwards to measure the impact of your project. Your success criteria could look something like “increase overall employee engagement by x%.”

It’s useful to make your success criteria transparent so that everyone understands that you will be evaluating the change and reacting to what you learn.

This isn’t because you need to give the impression that you’ll roll changes back over time but rather to establish an open, transparent culture, in which failure is allowed and accepted.

It’s a way to say: We’ll see if this works and if it doesn’t, we’ll react to it because we’re measuring it and can tell.  

Limit the frequency of large changes

When you’re going through the implementation of something like this, you should always limit exactly how often you roll out big changes across your team.

It’s much better to do smaller changes incrementally, give people time to adapt to them, and then build on them slowly, rather than shaking everything up every few months. It could be that you can’t avoid it because those changes are forced by external circumstances (for example, an acquisition). That can’t be helped. Where you can help it though, you should definitely try.

Change fatigue is real and it will slow your team down.

It’ll also make it hard for them to regain their engagement and vitality, and it won’t help you when it comes to building a resilient, adaptable team.

Evaluation

How long you wait to do the evaluation depends on the kind of change and how long the process to get there was.

If it took 6 months just to roll it out, it’ll likely take 6 months for people to even start adjusting to it.

You want to give yourself enough distance that you can look back and identify both short- and mid-term consequences honestly but not so much distance that you forget how the initial process went.

It might help to keep a “lessons learned” document where you jot down thoughts related to how it’s going throughout so that when you’re doing the final evaluation at the end, you have enough information to look back on without relying exclusively on your memory.

It’s best to share your evaluation and make that transparent.

It’s likely that their perspectives will enrich yours and it will also allow you to establish a culture around reflection and learning from every experience across your team.

Ultimately, to know if your change was really successful, you need to look at its adoption rate (how many people have participated and engaged with it) and what their impressions and feelings about that change are.

These are the teams that everyone always wants to be a part of.

Motivated employees are more productive, happier, and more relaxed, leading to a less stressful and more enjoyable work environment. They achieve higher performance levels, which reflects positively on the manager’s leadership skills.

It also benefits the company as a whole, leading to better products, happier customers, and higher employee retention.

How to motivate employees (without money)

Establishing a people-first leadership style

The best and easiest way to start is to work on your own leadership style.

In practice that means:

• Listening and caring: Take time to listen to your employees’ concerns and worries. React with openness and gratitude when people bring problems to you. Reinforce this until your team gets in the habit of doing this on their own.
• Empowering and delegating: Delegate tasks to the lowest level possible. Provide clear directions, make sure there’s a time frame involved, and an out, in case it doesn’t work out. The goal is to provide opportunities for people to take ownership of their own tasks and feel empowered to make decisions.
• Provide direction and clarity: Have clear expectations for your team members on every level. Communicate your expectations explicitly. Ensure that your team’s perceptions and your expectations are as closely aligned as possible. Prioritize well, meaning saying no to some things and focusing on others.
• Be honest and humble: Be honest and vulnerable in your leadership. Be open to feedback and changing your mind. Question yourself before you question others. Look for ways to improve the situation, even if not solely your fault.

Recognise intrinsic motivators

Knowing their motivators

The best tool that you, as a manager, have to improve the motivation levels in your team is understanding what motivates every individual you work with.

There are many different models and tests that you can use to find these out.

• Gallup’s StrengthFinder 2.0 is a great one to understand the types of areas that someone excels at and finds fun to do.
• Moving Motivators by Management 3.0 is another useful tool to help someone talk through and understand the aspects of a job that are important to them personally.
• Daniel Pink highlights three different, primary motivators in his book Drive.

Using a model like this works as a starting point because it will give your team the language that they need to think about and express what motivates them.

One-on-one meetings provide an invaluable opportunity to delve into the motivations and perspectives of your team members. These meetings should be more than just performance reviews; they should be structured to foster open dialogue and build rapport. During these interactions, ask open-ended questions about their career goals, interests, and what they find fulfilling in their current role.

Take the time to understand their motivations behind their decisions, such as why they chose their current career path or their reasons for joining the company. By exploring these personal narratives, you can gain valuable insights into their intrinsic and extrinsic motivators.

Using motivators

Once you have a grasp of your team’s motivators, you can begin to create a work environment that aligns with their individual needs. This may involve tailoring responsibilities, providing opportunities for growth and development, or offering incentives that resonate with their intrinsic or extrinsic drivers.

For instance, if an employee is motivated by curiosity, encourage them to explore new ideas, experiment with different approaches, and share their learnings with the team. For those driven by mastery, provide opportunities to expand their knowledge and skills through training, mentorship, or participation in challenging projects.

If status is a key motivator, recognize their expertise and contributions by assigning them leadership roles or allowing them to present their work to senior management. Similarly, if an employee thrives on autonomy, provide them with the flexibility to manage their own projects and make decisions within their area of expertise.

Employee motivation is not a static concept; it can evolve over time as individuals grow and their priorities shift.

That’s why it’s good to regularly evaluate the effectiveness of your motivational strategies and adapt them accordingly.

Revisit your team members’ motivational profiles every six months or so to assess the impact of your interventions and identify any areas for improvement.

Use this feedback to refine your approach and ensure that you are continuing to meet the evolving needs of your team.

Become your team’s biggest advocate

These are the stages of representing your team well.

When you’re in a middle management position, you’ll often have some issues that you can tackle on your level. Some of the issues that land on your desk, however, will be ones that can only be dealt with on a higher level. Depending on the complexity of your company’s structure, some of those issues might be just one level higher, some might require handling on the highest level, across the whole company.

Most of the aspects of a job that either negatively or positively impact someone’s motivation sit on different levels.

What you want to do as a manager is improve your own level and then try to influence the level under you (which is the individual level) and the level above you.

Understand their perspective

So much of good management starts with simply understanding the problem. This can be difficult because, in some cases, people will identify a problem but it will not be the problem that actually matters the most to them.

There was one point of contention that used to come up consistently in one of the first support teams that I managed, which was the structure and content of our knowledge base.

The knowledge base had been revamped at some point in the near past and the new version was much more concise, covering only the most essential information.

The idea behind this was to create something that was easy to maintain, rather than a comprehensive resource that would require intense maintenance effort.

To a certain extent, this decision was in conflict with some of the department’s goals, around reducing the demand for support.

This was one of the most unpopular decisions across the department of all time.

Even two years after the new knowledge base had been released, there was consistent, repetitive feedback around all of the ways in which it was lacking. The problem might have been the quality of the knowledge base at the beginning and, to hear anyone tell it, it was still the biggest concern of everyone who repeatedly raised it.

After two years of this feedback, the actual problem became the fundamental lack of trust in the relationship between management, the people who maintained the knowledge base, and the rest of the department.

Tackling the root cause of the problem is the only way to solve this:

• Resentment like this can build up over a series of small, maybe inconsequential decisions and interactions.
• The more meaningful solution now isn’t to go back on the decision but to work on rebuilding trust between these levels, starting with processes to encourage feedback and transparency.
• The goal would be to have more robust relationships in place in which everyone feels heard and respected.

The only real technique there is to achieve this is listening and observing. When you have conversations with people, especially emotionally fraught ones, you need to be careful to not get caught up in having the conversation.

Your primary focus should be to ask multiple questions to try to make sense of why someone feels a certain way or where their reaction is coming from.

Observation includes everything else around a reaction: their facial expressions, their body language, whether they seem to disengage from a topic or not.

All of these are signs.

Address the problem

When you understand your team’s response to an issue, you have to react to that information somehow. That might look different, depending on the situation:

• You need to be upfront if you think an issue isn’t worth escalating.
• You need to find the right balance between listening to their concerns and using your own judgement to figure out where and how you’ll react to something.
• You also need to be honest and straightforward when you think a particular issue can’t be fixed.

To take another example that’s fairly typical of a support team, having a mutually useful and productive relationship between support and product often requires conscious effort and work. Most of the support teams I’ve worked with have reported feeling that their feedback isn’t heard or taken into consideration at some point. In every situation, there will have been one event (or multiple events) that led to their perceptions. You as the manager have to sit down and figure out where the actual source of the problem lies.

Sometimes that’s been a valid problem that needed addressing with the product or QA team that received the feedback. Sometimes the real problem was that the feedback wasn’t provided by the support team in a way that was understandable or the priority of an issue wasn’t made clear.

These are exactly the kinds of distinctions that you need to make directly to your team, so they know that their concerns were fully heard and understood but that you ultimately decided to deal with a situation in a different way.

Advocate directly

The final part of this is to genuinely advocate for your team.

You have two major responsibilities as a manager.

1. One is to your team, to enable them to succeed and perform to the best of their ability.
2. The other responsibility you have is to the company, to enable the company to get the highest possible value it can from your team.

In some situations, those two responsibilities will be in conflict.

Let’s say the company is a seasonal business and there are certain times of year you can’t afford to allow vacation, even when it would be ideal for your team’s mental health and wellbeing. Or the company might have restrictions on the kinds of developmental opportunities that they would support, so you have to say no to a course that would be personally valuable for someone.

The goal is always to bring these two needs as close to each other as possible, but it’s normal for there to be situations when that doesn’t work out.

To approach this in the right way, you need to consider the pros and cons of making a decision in either direction and back up your case.

• You want to look for compromises where you can and suggest solutions that you think could work for both parties.
• For example, if your team is understaffed, you have to make the case for why you need additional resources and how those resources justify their cost for the company.
• If your team is struggling to cover a particular task or responsibility because you lack the skills to do it well, you need to look for ways to enable the people in your team to develop those skills.

Any of these situations can be demotivating and frustrating.

You might not be the person ultimately responsible for making the decision that could resolve that. In these cases, your responsibility is to communicate that need and argue for it.

Once you’ve done that, you also have to let your team know how that discussion went. Knowing that you need to close the feedback loop yourself will not only hold you accountable, it’ll also make it easier for your team to trust you and raise those issues.

Act as one team

Understanding and utilizing employee motivators is a continuous process that requires dedication, empathy, and a willingness to adapt.

By investing the time and effort to understand what makes your team members tick, you can create a work environment that fosters engagement, productivity, and overall employee satisfaction, ultimately contributing to the success of your organization.

It’s one of the first ways to move away from top-down management, to a more inclusive style that enables and empowers employees. It’s incredibly difficult to do right.

You have to toe the line between delegating just enough that your team members feel motivated and challenged, and not so much that they feel overwhelmed or assume you’re passing off some of your work.

How to delegate your tasks during the work day

1. Cluster your tasks into different levels

Go through all the things that you do regularly and cluster them according to whether they’re possible to delegate and how easy they are to delegate.

Separate them into:

• Complex tasks that could only be delegated to highly skilled team members or that need to be broken down into specific areas. These could be tasks like figuring out how to roll out a whole new system or setting up a project that involves multiple stakeholders from scratch.
• Simple tasks that could be delegated to most people, as long as they have one skill, like writing documentation for a project, answering a specific type of email or becoming a temporary liaison with another department.

Once you’ve built this overview of your own tasks, you can start thinking about what you can delegate to whom.

2. Figure out the strengths and weaknesses of every individual in your team

As a manager, one of your key responsibilities is to assess the performance of your team members.

Start by assessing the skills that are necessary for success in their role. Imagine the perfect person fulfilling this position.

• What skills would they have?
• What would they be able to do really well?
• Figure out a brief schema for each role.
• Evaluate each person’s performance according to the skills you laid out.
• Focus on finding specific examples that match (or don’t match, as the case may be) the behaviour you want to see.

You should also think about their personality and what their natural inclinations are.

Think of how they respond in different situations. How do they deal with challenges? How do they handle feedback? What makes them get defensive? What motivates them? Are they the kind of person who would volunteer for anything? Do they find it hard to do things outside of their comfort zone?

This is the kind of information you can only pick up through observation, time, and experience.

If you don’t feel like you have a clear handle on this already, there are a lot of tools out there that can help you with both.

StrengthsFinder 2.0 is a framework developed by Gallup that identifies a person’s strengths with the help of a quiz. It also gives you suggestions for how those strengths can be further developed. This can translate extremely well when it comes to identifying strengths and weaknesses.

The Big 5 Personality Traits is another model that’s great for understanding where a person’s natural inclinations are.

16Personalities is yet another option and that one is mostly free. It takes a measure of trust and comfort to participate in a quiz like this and then share the results, so it’s usually easier to do it as a team and share your own results as well.

3. Match the tasks that you can delegate to the right person.

To judge if you’ve matched a task to the right person, ask yourself the following questions:

• Do they have the prerequisite skills to have a good chance at succeeding? How have they shown you that they’re capable of doing it?
• Do they have the right temperament or personal inclination to even be interested in this task? Will the task develop them in a direction that they care about? For example, it doesn’t make sense to delegate the task of preparing a presentation to someone who absolutely hates giving presentations and who doesn’t believe that developing that skill is important for them.
• Is there any other person better suited for this task? The answer here doesn’t have to be no but you should be able to articulate exactly why you’re giving it to one person over another.
• Why exactly do you want to delegate this task? There’s a difference between delegating to lessen your own workload and delegating to reward good performance. If you want to encourage someone by giving them more opportunities because they’ve been working extremely hard, the way you communicate this should be very different.

Err on the side of giving ambitious people the more challenging tasks because they’ll be driven and committed to following through.

People who prefer stability and comfort will need many more incremental changes over a longer period of time.

Both are completely fine. You just need to identify the right tasks for the right people.

4. Communicate the task and your vision

In order to set someone up to truly succeed, your communication about your expectations has to be on point.

When you talk to your team member about the task, make sure you talk about the why. This will help them understand your intentions and give them a clearer impression of what you’re looking for.

The next thing you need to do is imagine the perfect end result. Focus purely on the outcome and then break it down, so you can describe it better. What aspects are essential? What aspects are nice to have? At what point is the task officially finished? What would make it successful?

5. Monitor delegated tasks

Be clear about how often you’ll be checking in with each other.

• Figure out a schedule and a format.
• Every check-in should include an overview of the current status, progress made in the last while since you spoke, and an idea of what the next steps will be.
• Ask if there are blockers or if there are additional things they need help with. This should cover the basics when it comes to providing ongoing support.

Your responsibility is to provide exactly as much direction as they need, whenever they need it.

If they don’t need very much, then all you need to do is check in at regular intervals and give them feedback on how they’re doing.

If they need a lot more direction, you might have to step in more often. Maybe the person you’ve delegated to needs help in getting started. In that case, you should set up a meeting where you try to prompt them to break the task down into chronological steps and then get them to document it before they start working on them.

Your focus should always be on coaching and guiding them to coming up with things on their own though. If you’re doing 90% of the thinking and they’re simply following your lead, this is a sign that the task might be too complex for them.

Watch out for any signs that someone is uncomfortable asking for help.

• A certain level of independence and desire to manage things on their own is of course important.
• It’s okay for you to make an effort to check in more often with that person but if tasks stop moving completely until you do that, this is another thing to address.

That said, be very self-critical. It’s possible that the reason you’re stepping in so much is because you have a very clear idea of how the project should be done. In this case, you need to learn how to coach without micromanaging.

If you’re keeping such a close eye on their progress because you need it, not them, then this is something that you should work on and try to improve. The point of delegation is the exact opposite of micromanagement.

Remember that you need a basic level of trust that this person can do a great job at this specific task before you delegate it. If you’ve done your preparation work properly, there’s no reason to not give them more space.

If it doesn’t seem to be working out, you should step in and take over that task again.

How soon you do this depends a lot on how urgent the task is.

Make sure you give the person enough of a chance to really work on it. Give them feedback regularly, explain what isn’t working, and give them time to improve or change it. If you do this two or three times with no progress, then it’s time for you to act. Don’t let things like this drag on for a longer period of time because they’re uncomfortable to address.

6. Be clear about the decision-maker

Try to clarify who the final decision-maker is from the very beginning.

Is the purpose of the project to make a recommendation based on some criteria but then you, the manager, will be deciding what the best course of action is? Is the purpose to actually implement something? Do you expect them to simply inform you of what they’re implementing, do you want time to give advice but let them make the final decision, or do you want to approve what they’re doing?

These kinds of nuances can make a huge difference. If they’re clear from the beginning, it’ll be much easier for everyone involved. Lack of clarity about who’s responsible for making a decision will always slow a project down and can lead to easily avoidable conflict when someone acts but you don’t want them to.

There are good tools like Delegation Poker from Management 3.0 that you could use to figure this out.

Become a better delegator

Delegation is simpler in theory than it is in practice but breaking it down with objective criteria makes it much easier.

It also makes you a better leader, who can recognise people’s skillset and adapt their tasks to their strengths easier.

Taking the extra time here can develop your team’s development and help you level up as a manager.

Negotiating for a higher salary feels deeply uncomfortable.

The manager and employee perspective tend to be very far from each other.

The manager should be:

• Assessing the current performance level of the employee.
• Looking at growth and development since the last raise.
• Deciding if there’s been an increase in contribution and the value generated for the business by this employee.

Typically, the employee perspective includes:

• Wanting to be rewarded and recognised for their work.
• Difficulty maintaining motivation and high performance if they’re disappointed.
• A desire to see their salary increase as their experience increases.

Here’s the essential tip: If your argument is a list of responsibilities that are key to your job and that you’ve been fulfilling at the same level of performance for years, any raise at all is hard for the manager to give.

This is where your argument could fall through the cracks.

As an employee asking for a pay raise, there’s a lot that you can do before you even start the conversation that can transform the discussion for you.

When you don’t get the raise you expected

Negotiating is hard:

• Talking about money is deeply uncomfortable. Something about asking for money often makes people feel like they’re being greedy.
• It requires assertiveness. If you’re more of an agreeable person, you’re more likely to shy away from conflict or put yourself in these situations where there are opposing sides.
• Self-assessing the value of your work isn’t objective. How do you know if you should be asking for more money? How do you know if you’re contributing more than you’re getting paid for? In most companies, there’s very little salary transparency.
• Dealing with little salary transparency. Minimal structure in your company could also translate to not understanding what types of skills you need to develop and what kind of contribution they’re looking for when they’re considering paying someone a higher salary.
• Managers typically don’t articulate clearly what conditions are required for a higher salary. Deciding on a salary is often a mixture of different factors and explaining these factors completely in a way that’s comprehensible to the employee is complex.

External circumstances could make this even worse.

For example, there may be generational differences in salary (earlier employees got paid more). Even if you know how much you’re getting paid in comparison to your colleagues, that might no longer be in line with what the company is willing to pay.

How could I ask for more money?

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to earn more money and to better yourself.

Earning more money can have a huge impact on your life when it comes to your living standards, your investment opportunities, your independence, your goals, and the life you’re able to provide for your family.

A higher salary is often an indication of progression: you’ve levelled up in one aspect and one area of your life. That’s something that you can be proud of.

This is what would happen if you’re successful.

The point of the advice below is to increase your chances of success as much as possible.

That said, whether you’re successful or not, the act of asking alone is a way to take a step forward and learning to negotiate on your own behalf. Asking for a pay raise is a way of advocating for yourself and looking out for your future.

Some of the content here is around figuring out whether you should even get a pay raise or not and building a case for yourself. Going through these steps, in general, is a great way for you to understand where your performance level is at, what the usual salary range for your position is, and what your chances of getting paid more are.

This is research that will pay off in your future, even if it doesn’t work in your current position. You can use this experience if you ever have to change jobs, too.

How to ask for a pay raise

The essential steps to ask for a pay raise are:

1. Create objective performance criteria.
2. Research the salary ranges for your position and market.
3. Break down your own contribution to the company.
4. Understand how salary negotations are managed at your company.
5. Set personal targets for your salary.
6. Decide on the raise (if any) you’ll ask for.
7. Prepare a list of arguments.
8. Talk to your manager.

Create objective performance criteria

The most difficult prerequisite is being objective.

Everything else, in terms of doing research, being prepared, and how to have the conversation itself, will be very hard to do, if you are not approaching it from the most objective mindset possible.

Being totally objective is obviously impossible, to a certain extent, because you will be assessing your own performance and deciding what kind of salary you, personally, feel that you deserve based on that. Whatever you can do to make that assessment as objective as possible will have a huge impact on the likelihood of success.

There’s a tendency to say “I deserve more money because I’m working incredibly hard and I’m doing the best job I can.”

This isn’t a bad tendency, in and of itself, but it isn’t enough.

• You need to be able to demonstrate value that everyone around you recognises.
• What’s the actual, visible impact of you working incredibly hard?
• You need to find a way to separate your own personal investment in the outcome of this conversation and this objective assessment of your performance.
• That means developng enough emotional distance to be able to have the conversation even if it isn’t heading in the direction that you want.

Build an external persona

Imagine someone else in the same position doing a perfect job. What does doing a perfect job look like?

• Define this on a per-task basis.
• Then think about all of the other aspects of your job that aren’t task-based: teamwork, giving and receiving feedback, living your company’s values, impact on your own team and on other teams.
• Use this to develop a set of criteria, by which you can judge and assess performance in your position.
• Now that you have these criteria, try to think about your performance in comparison to them. What aspects are you great at? What are you not so good at?

Getting used to thinking about your performance from this lens should make it easier to handle the whole conversation.

For all this conversation will feel immensely personal, remember that your manager and company have other aspects that they have to take into consideration, many of which will never be fully transparent to you.

Approach it as a learning exercise and try to learn from the experience. Do your best to not get hung up on the outcome. It would be great if it works out! But it’s okay if it doesn’t because you’ll hopefully learn what you need to do for the future.

Research salary ranges

Try to find out what the salary ranges for your position are. Try to also search for your industry, field, and area.

Since salary ranges differ dramatically depending on where you’re located, it makes sense to consider that as well.

If you’re lucky, your company might already have salary ranges that are transparent to everyone. This is a great starting point but take the time to do independent research as well. You want to get example ranges from multiple different sources, just start by using Google and see if you can identify a few sources that seem reliable.

You should have an idea of what the usual range is for your position. Ideally, your current salary should sit somewhere within that range.

• If it’s already in the high end of the range you find, you will likely have to make an argument for why your contribution is even higher than the expectations of your position.
• If your salary is rather on the lower end, you’ll hopefully have an easier time making the argument that your contribution is worth more.
• If your salary is even below the lower end, you can make an argument that you’re actually underpaid for your position in your industry.

Break down your own contribution

This is the point at which you can start looking at your own contribution. Break down the value that you bring to your company. There are a lot of different aspects to this but here’s a starting point:

1. Experience. How many years have you been working in total? How many years have you been working in this industry or this position in your company? Is there anything unique about the experience you have to date?
2. Education. Education includes degrees, certifications, and courses as well. If you’re actively investing in your education and you have paperwork and documentation that back that up, that’s something to include here.
3. Unique skill set. This is essentially the outcome and combination of the above two points. What skills do you have? What can you do really well? How easy is it to develop those skills from scratch?
4. Performance. What would it take to bring your performance to the next level? Are you a high performer or an average performer? Be as honest as you can be with yourself. In an ideal scenario, your perception of your performance should always be pretty close to your manager’s. If that isn’t the case, that’s something you have to address with them.
5. Responsibilities. What are the tasks that you do on a day-to-day basis? Have they changed or grown in complexity since your last salary discussion?
6. Impact. What is your impact on your team and the people who work with you? Would they notice if you weren’t around? Does your team work better when you’re around? This is another huge lever when it comes to salary discussions.What is your impact on your team and the people who work with you? Would they notice if you weren’t around? Does your team work better when you’re around? This is another huge lever when it comes to salary discussions.

Say your performance is stable and your responsibilities haven’t grown. You can only base your argument on experience. This isn’t the strongest argument if you aren’t able to demonstrate how that experience resulted in an improvement.

Growing in responsibility doesn’t have to translate to managing people if that isn’t where you want to go. It can mean managing tasks, growing in expertise and therefore becoming better able to help other people in your team, or taking ownership of certain areas.

Ultimately, you need to use these factors to demonstrate that there’s been a development since your last raise.

Understand salary negotiations in your company

Before you sit down and talk to your manager about your salary, find an opportunity to talk to them about salaries in general.

Many of the misunderstandings and conflicts I’ve seen happening around this topic are because people don’t start on the same page, so the communication gets very confused.

• Under what circumstances does your company generally provide a pay raise?
• What do they take into consideration?
• What kind of structure do they have around it?
• How do they ensure fair pay?
• What kind of pay raise do they give to denote “good job, we’re happy with your performance” versus “great job, we’re impressed with your performance”?

Every manager or HR department should be able to have that conversation with every one of their employees.

The point of this isn’t to interrogate your manager or to question them thoroughly. Sometimes, especially if people are taken by surprise and aren’t prepared, they won’t have great answers for you. Your approach should be curiosity and open-mindedness.

The great thing about having this conversation before making any requests is that your expectations will be more realistic. If your manager says “usually a 10% pay raise constitutes significant growth in terms of responsibilities,” you’ll know if this is a requirement that you meet.

The best outcome would be to walk out of it with an idea of how your manager and your company approaches salary negotiations.

One of the more frustrating experiences I’ve had was with a member of my team, who built a completely false impression about pay raises in the company based on someone else’s experience. This is very easy to avoid

Set personal targets for your salary

It’s incredibly difficult to understand exactly where you want to be, in terms of salary. It’s also hard to link that to what is realistic for you in your current position and in your current company. Most of the limits that come your way aren’t explicitly set, but you should always go into it with the expectation that there will be a salary cap somewhere. There are two things that you should try to set as targets for yourself:

1. What is your ultimate goal from a salary perspective? How much money would you like to be earning from working full time?
2. What is the maximum that you can expect from your current position?

If you’re approaching this from a different perspective because you feel underpaid, then define your minimum acceptable salary and be honest about it. It’s extremely demotivating to work somewhere if you don’t feel like your work is valued and that you’re paid unfairly. It will be a draining experience, not only for you, but also for the people who work with you.

Decide on the raise you want

Now you have a ton of background information that you can pull into making this decision.

• The first decision is whether you’ll ask for a pay raise or not.
• The second decision you need to make is how much of a pay raise you’d like to ask for.

Salary is a qualitative measure of the value you represent for your company.

Can you definitely say that you bring more value to your company now than you did whenever that last discussion happened? If yes, then you should ask for a pay raise.

If your answer is maybe or you’re rather leaning towards no but you’d still like a pay raise, you should approach the conversation from a totally different angle: look for ways to develop first. Talk to your manager about that instead.

The only right time to have this discussion is when you can definitively say you’re providing additional value now.

Prepare a list of arguments

The crux of your argument should be something along the lines of “I am more valuable to the company now than I was when my current salary was decided.”

• You should be able to demonstrate exactly how you’re more valuable to the company now.
• Lean towards providing objective facts, not subjective impressions.
• Provide specific examples. For example, your argument shouldn’t be “I’m a hard worker and you can see that in my everyday work.” It should be, “As you could see from my work on this project, it was successful because I did the following things, and developed and brought in the following skills.”

You want to have around 3-4 strong points with specific examples that you can fall back on.

One of the difficulties here is in avoiding giving the impression that you’re only doing certain things to earn more money.

• Don’t list every single, small thing you’ve done that might be construed as additional to your day-to-day tasks like, “I help my colleagues when they have questions.”
• Avoid falling back on a performance level that’s simply part of your job. For example, if you work in a Support team, an argument on the basis of “I answer tickets” is not convincing. The current base salary that you earn already covers that.

I’ve asked people in my teams to do this in the past when they’ve asked for a higher pay raise than I originally offered. Some people reacted to that with aplomb. Most people gave me feedback that having to do this made them feel undervalued and unappreciated.

This might be a feeling that you have at this point: Why does it take so much effort to ask for a pay raise? Why can’t your manager simply say yes?

The simple answer is: They have a duty towards the company as a whole and payroll is the most expensive cost the company has. Managing that inappropriately can have major consequences on the company as a whole.

In an ideal world, no one would ever feel underpaid and there would never be mismatches between what a manager considers a fair salary for someone and what that person thinks is a fair salary for themselves.

But salary negotiations are rarely that straightforward.

Even if you have a ton of salary transparency in your company, with clearly defined structure and salary bands, there will still be disagreements about where a person sits within a range. Learning how to do your own independent research, and how to break that down into a negotiation in your favour is how you set yourself up for success.

Talk to your manager

Set up a meeting with your manager.

• You can either follow your company’s regular cadence (most companies usually have a salary discussion once a year, in an annual review).
• Or you can set up an individual meeting for it. To do so, just tell your manager that you’d like to talk about your salary, so they’re prepared when they go into the discussion.

During that meeting is when being objective, articulate, and calm really matters.

1. Start by saying that you’d like to get a pay raise.
2. Ask for a specific amount and then explain why you think you should get it, as openly as you can.
3. You can talk about the research you did coming into it but focus on your individual contribution and your impact.
4. Try to cut yourself off if you find yourself rambling. Focus on making the points that you prepared and then wait and listen to the response.

If the answer is a no at this point, try not to get angry or frustrated by it. Your preparation until this point was still valuable and useful. Treat this is a good opportunity for you to understand if there’s something else you missed.

Maybe your manager is taking something into consideration that you haven’t thought about. This is when you can learn it for the future. In this case, you want to walk out of this meaning with a clearer idea of what you would need to do to earn more money in the future.

If the answer is a yes, then congratulations! Your efforts paid off.

Starting a new job where you’ll be responsible for a group of people who you don’t know and who don’t know you is many degrees above that level of stress.

You have to be more careful about how you conduct yourself. When you’re responsible for assessing someone’s performance levels, and what kind of salary they get and you have the ability to shape and change the way their role is set up, those first few weeks can be fraught for both parties.

Just as you don’t know them and are focused on forming your first impressions, they don’t know you and have no idea what to expect from you.

43% of new managers who have been in their role for less than a year say they’ve had no training. If your company falls into that group, you have the power to change your circumstances. You can learn to lead meetings, understand your team’s motivators, get delegation right, and create your own 30-60-90 day plan.

Here’s an easy way to get started.

Leading a new team

Here’s an example scenario.

1. The head of a marketing department leaves at short notice.
2. Her replacement starts a week later and makes multiple, large decisions in a row that change the department’s structure.
3. He makes many positions redundant, publicly, in front of the entire team.
4. One of the people impacted bursts into tears and storms out of the room at work.
5. Everyone in the department walks on eggshells for weeks afterward.

This is a situation that happened and caused weeks of stress for everyone involved. Once the changes settled, everyone got along with the new head and had minimal problems.

Much of these situations’ conflict can be avoided if decisions are made from a foundation of trust.

If people already know you, trust your judgment, and believe that you want to make decisions that work in everyone’s favor (and not just your own), there will automatically be less friction. Getting the first few weeks and months right creates an easier transition for everyone. It helps you build the kinds of relationships that can really withstand these types of situations.

The benefits of a plan for your transition

A smooth transition pays off on three levels: for you, for your team as a group, and for the individuals in your team.

1. Start at a higher performance level. Extra stress means distractions that you can avoid, which automatically lowers your performance.
2. Your team can adjust and perform faster. If your team is bogged down and stuck in conflicts, they’ll spend more energy managing those than focusing on their jobs.
3. Enable each individual to succeed. Developing a foundation of trust means people will contribute and provide you with the input they (and you) need to have a successful working relationship.

Most 30-60-90 days plans are unrealistic because they focus on tasks or outcomes. These don’t make it possible for you to adjust based on the circumstances or handle emergencies if they come up.

This broad, big-picture plan will help you carry your team forward, no matter what you experience.

How to tackle the first months

There are three aspects to consider that will set you up for success:

1. Adopt the right mindset geared towards growth.
2. Structure your knowledge and impressions.
3. Focus on the big picture.

Adopt the right mindset

Decide on your mindset before you start working in that role. These are some questions to consider:

• How do you want to approach your position and your first months?
• What are the most important things you want to achieve?
• How long do you think it will take to achieve them?
• What will help you achieve them?

Intentionality is a great starting point. If you intend to be humble and cautious, you’re more likely to succeed at it.

A practical example of mindset in action

Say your team has minimal structure and one of your responsibilities is to help them navigate their responsibilities–by providing that structure. You’ll need to:

• Understand which processes they do have in place,
• Ask which new processes are sorely needed, and
• Improve the ones that exist but aren’t successful.

That means getting to know the people you’re working with and determining their priorities. But it also comes with some pitfalls: If the team needs structure, you might have to implement big changes immediately.

Consider what the right balance for you is. You want to make changes that are necessary and helpful while being a little cautious and holding back from changing anything that’s already working.

Structure your knowledge

Want an easy way to structure what you learn when you start a new job? Write down notes.

You have fresh eyes when you start in a new position. But because your first weeks are so busy, it’ll be hard to remember every small impression. You’re probably wasting brain space if you have the same thought twice. You don’t have to invest a huge amount in this. Find yourself some post-its, a notebook, a Google Doc–whatever tool lends itself naturally to you.

A practical example of structure in action

Take notes throughout your first week. At the end of the week, block out an hour or two to go through them. Now start clustering and structuring them in whatever way makes sense to you.

These are some questions to think about:

• What will bring the most value to your team in the fastest period?
• What has been neglected for a long time and is starting to hold the team back?
• Are there any burning fires you need to handle immediately?
• What parts are going well that you don’t want to touch?

You can use any format to answer these questions that works for you. Maybe you like mind-mapping tools because they’re easy to brainstorm or prefer a visual representation using a tool like Miro. Maybe you’d rather do it all on paper.

Focus on the big picture

Now you can escape the granular details and try to abstract the bigger picture.

The best way to figure this out is to look at the clusters you’ve collected so far, then consider:

• Do any of these topics seem to have a huge positive impact on your team?
• How can you get an immediate win?

Finding opportunities to work closely with your team early on will make it easier for you to get to know them better and quicker while giving you a chance to bond over a quick success. Set some short-term goals with a brief timeline for when you’d like to achieve them.

A practical example of abstracting the big picture

Say your team is working on too many tasks simultaneously without understanding their priorities in relation to each other. They feel a lack of purpose and are unable to finish projects.

• Focus and direction are the big-picture problems you want to tackle.

Another example might be that your teammates don’t know each other well and feel disconnected. The result is a lack of trust and a desire to avoid conflict.

• This is an opportunity to work on team-building and enable the team to work more closely together.

Defining the broader themes is the goal. Each of these issues might come up in 5-10 small ways. When you put them together, it becomes clear that there’s a bigger problem to deal with.

A detailed plan to lead a new team

Taking over a team with the right mindset saves all parties a ton of hassle. Following the steps above is a way to set yourself up for success with just a little work and effort.

If that level of detail isn’t enough and you want some tools to support you on your journey, check out these:

• 30-60-90 day checklist as a new manager
• Topics for your first one-on-ones
• Team-building workshop ideas
• The “5 Stages of Team Development”
• Questions to get feedback from your team after the first 6 months